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How Foreign Cities Cope
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19317 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
2,480 Words |
| Author
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Peter Hall
Peter Hall is director of the Institute of Urban and Regional
Development and professor of city and regional planning at the
University of California-Berkeley. |
There is no one worldwide urban crisis. There are multiple urban cities, and different cities have to cope with different packages. In Baghdad and Kuwait, for example, people are still worrying about water and electricity. Muscovites are obsessed with the search for bread. In the Third World, the main concern of city planners and administrators is how to provide adequate shelter and services for the tens of thousands of new citizens who arrive every year. And in the industrialized world, traffic congestion and urban growth management have been priority issues.
Many major American cities have had to grapple simultaneously with the erosion of their industrial base, the increasing distress of their less affluent citizens, and a rising tide of drug-related crime. Ominous signs exist that some European cities, which previously thought themselves immune, may be infected by this latter virus.
Some of these problems go far back. Nearly half a century ago, faced with the beginnings of urban sprawl, major European cities began to prepare plans to manage their own growth. London's, one of the most celebrated, was actually produced in the middle of World War II. Patrick Abercrombie's blueprint proposed a greenbelt to stop further suburban sprawl, plus new towns farther out. These would not be bedroom suburbs but self-contained places for working and living.
Despite a host of problems, the British stuck with their plan. There are now 11 new towns around London. They have been outstandingly successful, not least as commercial developments; the British taxpayers, who footed the original bill, have seen their investment pay off handsomely. And the new towns have acted as magnets for development, so that the ring of maximum population and job growth is now 50 or more miles from London. The southeast corner of England, once dominated by London, is now a multicentered city region with 30 or 40 cities, separated by open green countryside but efficiently linked by expressways and high-speed trains.
Sweden, about the same time as London, took a different tack. Its capital, Stockholm, planned satellite towns linked to the city by a new transit system. Each satellite complex would have its own built-in shopping and services, all designed to be highly transit-accessible. To complete the picture, Stockholm planners built up residential densities around the transit stops, so that apartment dwellers could walk to their trains or to their shops. At about the same time, during the 1950s, Toronto planned similar high-density pyramids around its new
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